He seemed perfectly humiliated, and could not realize why he should have been thus maltreated. He, Judge White, with a pedigree going back to William the Conqueror, had been set on by dogs who had run on his bank! His bank! The White Bank! The First National Bank, of whose stability he had been so proud; and worse even than this, if anything could be worse, he had heard himself called “Old Money Bags” and derided with groans and caterwaulings from boys; and men, too, he believed, had joined in the howls, he could still hear as he lay upon his couch with his hands to his ears. He could see, too, with closed eyes the scowling faces which had looked up at him when he stood upon the balcony, trying to bring order out of confusion, and the threatening face which had looked in at him from the window. It was dreadful, and the proud man writhed under his load of mortification, made worse by the fact that his friends in Worcester and Springfield, who were coming to the party, would hear of it, and naturally have a little less faith in his solidity as a banker. How he wished they were not coming; and that the party was in perdition; and he consigned his wife there with it, when she tried to make him take something to eat, saying he would not be able to appear in the evening if he kept on in this way. He didn’t much think he should appear in the evening, to be talked to and sympathized with by people who, all the time, were wondering if his bank were safe. “Go away about your business,” he said at last, crossly, “and shut the door to keep out that confounded clatter which makes me think of the noise the mob made when they came tearing in—Nancy Sharp with the rest. Think of that? Nancy Sharp! Didn’t I give her half a ton of coal that winter she had the rheumatism, and hasn’t she cleaned the floor and windows of the bank every month for the last year, and wasn’t she among the first to stretch her great red, soapy arm for her ‘twenty silver dollars?’ Must have silver, as if we had kept her dirty money intact, and didn’t she say to the cashier, as she turned to go out, ‘I kinder pity the poor old man after all,’ meaning me! Susan, me! and I not yet sixty! I wonder I’m alive. Yes, I do. A run on my bank! If it had been Grey’s nobody would have wondered, but mine—mine! The First National! and _me_, pitied by Nancy Sharp and called a poor old man! _Me_! Susan, _me_!”